Monday: I teach web development. I got a classroom of bright but uncertain young things on their first day of their summer program, and I taught them some basic HTML and I taught them some CSS. I hope I did all right... the kids were overly quiet and didn't ask as many questions as I would have liked, and also didn't laugh at my jokes. Alas. But I know the students open up tremendously over the first few days of the program, so it's no surprise that they act like clams on Day 1 when they're still at max shyness and the material is simplest. At any rate, I was competent, and then it was over and I was off to my own learning.
Tuesday (Wednesday) Thursday Friday: circus school. Summer intensive has dance, theater, conditioning and stretching in the morning, then more focused work on our disciplines in the afternoon. Needless to say, this has kicked me straight to a "shower in the evening" schedule, and it's a lot of hours, what with regular evening classes on Wednesday and a private lesson today too. I'm appreciating that each day is different in the afternoon.
A few surprises: one is that, thus far, I've kind of liked the barre class. I'm sad that it's over after 3 lessons and next week we're going on to modern dance. Despite the uncoolness of the pre-work, they did use it well by splitting us into two groups, and my ultra-beginner group has moved at a pace I can mostly deal with. I like that there are just a few arm positions that one can learn and that can be relied on to look pretty once learned, and my balance is solid so all the releve business is easy. I don't think any of the usual barre classes run at times that work for my schedule right now, but at this point I'd consider taking one if they did, so that's interesting.
Theater is not my thing, but I am learning little bits. We did an exercise around the circle where everyone had to start with really happy emoting and transition to really sad, then pass that max emotion on to the next person (who'd transition it the other way and pass it on). Everyone had a different way of getting from one to another, and I kind of believed the teacher at the end when he said transitions are more interesting to the audience than extremes are.
Focused training is my thing. I haven't been personally excited about any of the acro thus far but I did build someone's first three-high on Friday, and I put in a LOT of time on handbalancing on Thursday. One of the reasons it made sense to do the intensive this year at all is that there are several handbalancers, and we're all at a fairly similar no-press-yet level. One girl is more solid than me, and maybe closer to her press, while also being taller, which definitely gives me a weird amount of hope. And I got to work with Bender.
The most interesting part, maybe, is how it's all poking at my brain. When we all did object manipulation on Friday (which turned out to be poi spinning), I picked up the rhythms of my old tricks way faster than ever before. And, even more interesting, I was musing about barre after class on Thursday when I started to get a random poetry idea, and then suddenly my two musings fell together and I knew exactly how to do a writing prompt from Steering the Craft that I'd been stuck on for a year. Then I had the time to go home and bang out a page of fiction, which also hasn't happened for ages. I'm so unstuck now! Still want to finish the poem idea, and also go on to the rest of the prompts from the book.
Urban Survival course. I followed up on the above with a 6-hr urban survival course from GoRuck on Saturday, organized by Lioness. It was supposed to be focused on urban survival post disaster: "learn what escape and evasion looks and feels like in a time of chaos". In practice, it didn't quite hang together and it basically felt like quasi-military training for people who aren't in the military. Which doesn't mean I learned nothing. I definitely learned that blisters form faster when one is carrying a giant backpack around (gah!), and how to light a fire using a 9V battery and #0000 steel wool in a stove made out of a coffee can, and how to break out of duct tape wrapped around wrists and ankles. My group did well in the final sneaking-around exercise, successfully taking a photo of another group without their knowledge while not getting similarly tagged ourselves. Overall, a perfectly fine thing to do once.
I did NOT sign up for the twelve-hour continued course that ran from 6PM to 6AM last night, but a bunch of people in my group did... I'll wait to hear how that went. I'm sure that sneaking around in the dark adds a lot to the tone of the experience, but I was in no way willing to lose sleep over it. Much better to do what I did and go to a party with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
heisenbug and Lion, and bounce around between them (and sundry friends) until the energy level dropped and I lured them both onto a couch with me. :-)
Today I'm mostly catching up on my doing nothing... and that's a good thing.
Tuesday (Wednesday) Thursday Friday: circus school. Summer intensive has dance, theater, conditioning and stretching in the morning, then more focused work on our disciplines in the afternoon. Needless to say, this has kicked me straight to a "shower in the evening" schedule, and it's a lot of hours, what with regular evening classes on Wednesday and a private lesson today too. I'm appreciating that each day is different in the afternoon.
A few surprises: one is that, thus far, I've kind of liked the barre class. I'm sad that it's over after 3 lessons and next week we're going on to modern dance. Despite the uncoolness of the pre-work, they did use it well by splitting us into two groups, and my ultra-beginner group has moved at a pace I can mostly deal with. I like that there are just a few arm positions that one can learn and that can be relied on to look pretty once learned, and my balance is solid so all the releve business is easy. I don't think any of the usual barre classes run at times that work for my schedule right now, but at this point I'd consider taking one if they did, so that's interesting.
Theater is not my thing, but I am learning little bits. We did an exercise around the circle where everyone had to start with really happy emoting and transition to really sad, then pass that max emotion on to the next person (who'd transition it the other way and pass it on). Everyone had a different way of getting from one to another, and I kind of believed the teacher at the end when he said transitions are more interesting to the audience than extremes are.
Focused training is my thing. I haven't been personally excited about any of the acro thus far but I did build someone's first three-high on Friday, and I put in a LOT of time on handbalancing on Thursday. One of the reasons it made sense to do the intensive this year at all is that there are several handbalancers, and we're all at a fairly similar no-press-yet level. One girl is more solid than me, and maybe closer to her press, while also being taller, which definitely gives me a weird amount of hope. And I got to work with Bender.
The most interesting part, maybe, is how it's all poking at my brain. When we all did object manipulation on Friday (which turned out to be poi spinning), I picked up the rhythms of my old tricks way faster than ever before. And, even more interesting, I was musing about barre after class on Thursday when I started to get a random poetry idea, and then suddenly my two musings fell together and I knew exactly how to do a writing prompt from Steering the Craft that I'd been stuck on for a year. Then I had the time to go home and bang out a page of fiction, which also hasn't happened for ages. I'm so unstuck now! Still want to finish the poem idea, and also go on to the rest of the prompts from the book.
Urban Survival course. I followed up on the above with a 6-hr urban survival course from GoRuck on Saturday, organized by Lioness. It was supposed to be focused on urban survival post disaster: "learn what escape and evasion looks and feels like in a time of chaos". In practice, it didn't quite hang together and it basically felt like quasi-military training for people who aren't in the military. Which doesn't mean I learned nothing. I definitely learned that blisters form faster when one is carrying a giant backpack around (gah!), and how to light a fire using a 9V battery and #0000 steel wool in a stove made out of a coffee can, and how to break out of duct tape wrapped around wrists and ankles. My group did well in the final sneaking-around exercise, successfully taking a photo of another group without their knowledge while not getting similarly tagged ourselves. Overall, a perfectly fine thing to do once.
I did NOT sign up for the twelve-hour continued course that ran from 6PM to 6AM last night, but a bunch of people in my group did... I'll wait to hear how that went. I'm sure that sneaking around in the dark adds a lot to the tone of the experience, but I was in no way willing to lose sleep over it. Much better to do what I did and go to a party with
heisenbug and Lion, and bounce around between them (and sundry friends) until the energy level dropped and I lured them both onto a couch with me. :-)Today I'm mostly catching up on my doing nothing... and that's a good thing.
